Heating and cooling of materials, such as steel, can alter the properties of the utilized material used to form finished products such as structural members, including frame rails for motor vehicles such as heavy trucks. Moreover, targeted heating, cooling, other processes, or the combination thereof can alter the properties to targeted properties or parameters. To this end, various processes of heating and/or cooling materials have been developed. However, such processes as are presently known yield structural members with distortions (such as bow or camber, etc.) which are expensive time-consuming to correct. Plus, known systems to harden and or temper metal products such as structural members have proven costly, time consuming, and/or relatively inefficient. Finally, known systems to harden and/or temper metals such as structural members require multiple pieces of equipment positioned separated from one another on large amounts of floor space (“foot print”) in a factory, requiring physical transfer of hot metal parts from one processing station to another. Such physical transfer of hot metal parts presents not only a safety issue, but also presents opportunities to introduce additional distortions into the product.
For example, processes to date that utilize heating as well as quenching and/or spraying with cool water of steel generally require large furnaces or ovens for heating and large tanks for rapid cooling, such as by spraying or quenching. As mentioned, such large equipment requires a large amount of floor space (“foot print”) or allocation of manufacturing space, which can be expensive as well as inefficient. Moreover, transferring of product between such large equipment is difficult and/or labor intensive. For example, transitioning from a large furnace/oven in one location to a large piece of cooling or quenching equipment in a second location may require transporting the treated equipment from one area of a manufacturing floor to another area (e.g., from a heating area to a quenching area) by fork truck, cargo truck, rail, etc., or even from one manufacturing building to another. This transportation of work pieces from one piece of processing equipment to the next piece of process equipment can be expensive and/or time consuming, leading to increased cost of production, production time, and/or inefficiencies that lower productivity or profit.
Thus, there is a need in the art both for producing a hardened and tempered structural member, and for overcoming issues of existing multiple facility or large foot print systems for producing hardened and tempered structural members with minimal distortions.